ISKO UK Meetup - On the pre-history of information technology by Stephen Robertson took place on 6 July 2021.

Presentation slides are available here.

ISKO UK KO Research Observatory event entitled "Observing knowledge organization trajectories in healthcare", took place on 30 June 2021 via Zoom and consisted of two presentations. 

Presentation slides are now available here.

In this  presentation Alex Church addressed the issues and challenges organisations and information managers are facing with the introduction of MS teams, providing practical advice on how to address them, focusing on the developing a robust information architecture and governance .

Slides are available here

In this talk Paul Rissen from Springer Nature has demystified the process of crafting a narrative, showing how information architecture and structured thinking can help us make sense of the stories we tell ourselves every day.

Slides are available here

With sadness we report the sudden death of Liz Marley on 14 April 2021, at the age of 53. She was a member of the Indexing and Data Management team at the House of Commons Library and she became its first ever Thesaurus Editor.

Among other commitments, she was a member of the Executive Committee of ISKO UK from 2015 to 2017 and a member of Taxonomies in the Public Sector (TiPS). Liz was a familiar face at Taxonomy Boot Camp London and ISKO UK conferences bringing common sense and a practical approach to the organisational side of the events, as well as humour and interesting conversations in the coffee breaks and social evenings.

She was generous with her time, often helping fellow taxonomists at the weekends for fun, in spite of her frequent travels to Morocco to advise the Moroccan Parliament on developing their information services.

We, at ISKO UK, wish to express our sincere condolences to Liz's family and friends.

Presentation slides and video recordings are now available for the first two VocBench Workshops organized by ISKO UK Meetup Team. Many thanks to  Armando Stellato, Phil Stacey and Eugene Morozov.

ISKO UK Hands-on Meetup: VocBench Workshops: Part 1: Introducing VocBench, 6 April 2021. See event page.

ISKO UK Hands-on Meetup: VocBench Workshops: Part 2: VocBench Data Import with Sheet2RDF, 4 May 2021. See event page.

Many thanks to Martin White for his excellent overview of computational ethnography on 28 April 2021. Presentation slides with additional references are now available at the event page.

Thanks to our speakers Andrew MacFarlane, Sondess Missaoui and Neil Maiden for kickstarting our first KO Research Observatory event "AI in supporting fact checking, news verification and creative work" . The event took place via zoom on 31 Mar 2021 and was attended by 67 participants from 25 countries. Presentation slides can be found on the event page.

ISKO UK Meetup starts a series of VocBench Workshops. VocBench is a free and open-source web application to build ontologies, knowledge organization systems and lexicons using web standards such as OWL, SKOS/SKOS-XL and Onto-Lex. The three-part workshop series on VocBench is organized by ISKO UK Meetup team members in collaboration with Dr. Amando Stellato. The workshops are intended for those considering to use or who have just started using VocBench.  We hope to build a community of VocBench users within the ISKO. Read more ...

The ISKO UK Executive Committee has taken the very difficult decision to cancel the ISKO UK 2021 biennial conference due to the insufficient number of submissions.

The overall response was too low for us to have a viable event. We are sorry for the disappointment that this will cause. The biennial conference is normally a highlight of our events calendar. We are grateful for the support that we have had from colleagues and potential authors and we would encourage authors to consider submitting research papers to the ISKO journal Knowledge Organization.

Over the last year ISKO UK has organised a well-attended series of online Knowledge Organization Meetups and the KO-ED series of workshops in response to the Covid-19 lockdown. These will continue to run in 2021 along with the Knowledge Organization Research Observatory workshops starting on 31st March.

ISKO UK Conference 2021 Programme Committee